Adult Language Input And Children Initiative Process: A Case Study Of Early Childhood Language Acquisition

Children’s language development has great significance in research. Existing researches are mainly on language acquisition mechanism, the continuity of language development, internal concrete aspects and development. As for language acquisition, different schools have different opinions, such as nativism, environmentalism and cognitive constructivism. Many researches have deputed nativism, but few researches involve external environment stimulation and children’s own initiative in the process of child language acquisition and the relation between the two. This study has been tracking record the early parent-child language activities under the natural conditions for11months. Besides, this study uses CHILDES to analyze the statistics. Based on statistics, this study analyzes effects of the external environment stimulation (mainly adults’language input) and children’s own initiative (mainly children’s launched initiative and processing initiative) on child’s early language acquisition. And then, this study discusses the relationship between those.The results show that, adult language input and children’s processing initiative have great significance in children’s language acquisition. Firstly, adult language input has effects on two aspects. As for vocabulary, adult language input has characteristics of verbs and situation, which influences children’s language acquisition and this child has the same characteristics with adults’. As for sentence, mother and the child has the same trend of mean length utterance. And children’s mean length utterance development increases with time, and gradually closer to mother’s mean length utterance. Secondly, children’s processing initiative affects their language acquisition. On one hand, children have processing strategies in voice, vocabulary and sentence. At the same time, children’s own voice, vocabulary and pattern have characteristics of children’s language processing and creativeness. On the other hand, the times that children generate increase with age increase. Besides, in the early language acquisition, adult language input and children’s own initiative affect each other. That is, adult language input creates premise for children’s processing initiative and children’s processing initiative also provides the possibility for the realization of the adult language input.Against language input and children’s processing initiative in child’s early language acquisition, and combined with the characteristics of this stage of children’s language development, the research puts forward some suggestions for children’s language development. Firstly, people should attach great importance to adult language input and provide rich and appropriate language stimulation. Secondly, people should inspire children’s initiative and give them appropriate developmental anticipates.